Backyard grilling has become very common throughout the world and keeping the grate clean is important. There are many grill grate cleaning devices available to the backyard griller and most of them do a pretty good job. One common grid grate cleaning device is a wire brush. This device can be a health hazard if the small wires break loose from the device and get deposited on the grate itself. These small wires can get picked up and stuck on the food that is being grilled, completely undetected. Because the wires are stuck on the food and undetected they are easily ingested and can become a health hazard. There are many documented cases of ingestion and illness due to this.
This device that is the subject of this invention helps to eliminate this problem by having larger, stiffer pins taking the exact shape of the grill and lock in place. The wire brush relies on the small diameter wires radically bending to take die shape of the grate. The individual wires become work hardened and brittle because of the back and forth motion of cleaning. The wires become brittle and break loose getting deposited on the grill grate. Because they are small, they go undetected.
Since the invented device's pins are of a larger diameter than a wire brash and do not bend during the scraping/cleaning process, it is not likely that they will break off and go undetected.
Existing methods of scraping/cleaning grill grates using either adjustable or formable scrapers are:
Grill Rack Cleaning Device: that is laterally adjustable, using tools to loosen and tighten individual friction locks. The clips are a predetermined shape that must be installed individually. They will clean a particular grill grate shape, but will not take the exact shape of a multitude of grill grates without the use of tools.
Adjustable Grill Scraper: that can be adjusted laterally with the use of tools to loosen and tighten individual friction locks for each grate. These are designed to clean grates that have different spacing however; there is no natural conformity to the grill grate for intimate cleaning of a variety of shapes and sixes of grill grate.
Heat Responsive Wood Scraper: that will take the shape of the grill grate. This method requires “burning” the shape of the grill grate into the end of the wood scraper by heating the grill to high heat and scraping the end of the paddle on the hot grill grates until the shape is worn in. This scraper will take the shape of the grate but is only good for that particular grate.
The inventor is not aware of any prior grill scraper/cleaner that uses something similar to the subject of this application.
There are multiple variations of the three approaches discussed above. Representative prior art is cited as Lann 708,611,7 (Cylindrical Clip), Hall 572,007,1 Rood 525,540,6 (Adjustable Grill Scraper), Thompson 874,106,8 (Meat Responsive Wood Scraper).